Of course there was nothing the matter with me, but I was very ill. I couldn’t work, sleep, eat, or bowl. The only way I could get any sympathy was to go without shaving for four days. Even then somebody would say: “Old man, you look as hardy as a pine-knot. Been up for a jaunt in the Maine woods, eh?”

Then, suddenly, I remembered that I must have outdoor air and exercise. So I went down South to John’s. John is an approximate relative by verdict of a preacher standing with a little book in his hands in a bower of chrysanthemums while a hundred thousand people looked on. John has a country house seven miles from Pineville. It is at an altitude and on the Blue Ridge Mountains in a state too dignified to be dragged into this controversy. John is mica, which is more valuable and clearer than gold.

He met me at Pineville, and we took the trolley car to his home. It is a big neighbourless cottage on a hill surrounded by a hundred mountains. We got off at his little private station, where John’s family and Amaryllis met and greeted us. Amaryllis looked at me a trifle anxiously.

A rabbit came bounding across the hill between us and the house. I threw down my suit-case and pursued it hot-foot. After I had run twenty yards and seen it disappear, I sat down on the grass and wept disconsolately.

“I can’t catch a rabbit any more,” I sobbed. “I’m of no further use in the world. I may as well be dead.”

“Oh, what is it—what is it, Brother John?” I heard Amaryllis say.

“Nerves a little unstrung,” said John in his calm way. “Don’t worry. Get up, you rabbit-chaser, and come on to the house before the biscuits get cold.” It was about twilight, and the mountains came up nobly to Miss Murfree’s descriptions of them.

Soon after dinner I announced that I believed I could sleep for a year or two, including legal holidays. So I was shown to a room as big and cool as a flower garden, where there was a bed as broad as a lawn. Soon afterward the remainder of the household retired, and then there fell upon the land a silence.

I had not heard a silence before in years. It was absolute. I raised myself on my elbow and listened to it. Sleep! I thought that if I only could hear a star twinkle or a blade of grass sharpen itself I could compose myself to rest. I thought once that I heard a sound like the sail of a catboat flapping as it veered about in a breeze, but I decided that it was probably only a tack in the carpet. Still I listened.

Suddenly some belated little bird alighted upon the window-sill, and, in what he no doubt considered sleepy tones, enunciated the noise generally translated as “cheep!”

I leaped into the air.

“Hey! what’s the matter down there?” called John from his room above mine.

“Oh, nothing,” I answered, “except that I accidentally bumped my head against the ceiling.”

The next morning I went out on the porch and looked at the mountains. There were forty-seven of them in sight. I shuddered, went into the big hall sitting-room of the house, selected Pancoast’s Family Practice of Medicine from a bookcase, and began to read. John came in, took the book away from me, and led me outside. He has a farm of three hundred acres furnished with the usual complement of barns, mules, peasantry, and harrows with three front teeth broken off. I had seen such things in my childhood, and my heart began to sink.

Then John spoke of alfalfa, and I brightened at once. “Oh, yes,” said I, “wasn’t she in the chorus of—let’s see—”

“Green, you know,” said John, “and tender, and you plough it under after the first season.”

“I know,” said I, “and the grass grows over her.”